About Jason Thibeault

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

Bullying the bullies into stopping bullying

Sometimes the bullies wear at a person’s resolve enough so that one little weird and probably innocuous incident from an unrelated source is enough to rattle that person. Enough to change the calculus used to determine whether something is worth doing, such that suddenly something that they were gung-ho to do (like Ophelia Benson speaking at TAM) becomes a headache just not worth undertaking.
It doesn’t matter that the last straw — the incident that caused the equation to flip from “worth it” to “not” — might have been completely innocent. It really doesn’t. All the damage has already been done.

The years of targeted hatred someone like Ophelia Benson has experienced has done its job, has sensitized her to the point where an ambiguous warning that she might be shot must needs be taken seriously. Especially where the convention at which she was to speak, has taken great pains as of late to studiously avoid any responsibility for making the convention a safe space for these people.

And yet, people have as of late taken to calling Freethought Blogs and its bloggers the bullies. I’m guessing it’s because when we say that harassment policies help to protect people from nonsense like this, and others complain bitterly that we’re trying to “ruin” their convention, they see our unwillingness to back down as an effort to bully them into seeing things our way.

I complained bitterly on Ophelia’s post that this situation played out the way it did.

Jafafa Hots @74:

Well, I guess TAM is now a safe space for poor Blackford now that one of the “bullies” isn’t going to be there.

I bet he, Stangroom, Sarah Mayhew and the ERVites are so pleased that they’ve successfully bullied one of the “bullies” out of the picture.

What’s the commonality between all four of the entities/groups I mentioned? They’ve claimed we’re the bullies. And, they’ve themselves bullied one or many of us. They’ve done all the chipping damage they needed, so that our resolves were weakened such that one of us, when faced with an ambiguously worded but creepy email flipped her “worth-it” equation.

And now they’re doing it with me, claiming, repeatedly, that I blamed them for the emails that Ophelia received. Of course, I didn’t. It doesn’t even take any kind of special parsing of my original bitter complaint about the bully-crying bullies to get exactly what I meant.

But what I meant doesn’t matter. Nor does what I actually said, regardless of how well it comports with what I meant. What matters is the narrative that the bullies built to be able to slime me with the epithet “liar”, and the fact that they’ll use it in isolation of corroborating evidence from now til eternity.

Do I care what the bullies themselves think? Of course not. It would be a difficult slog trying to post my beliefs and my philosophies on the internet every day if I had to kowtow to every bully who came along and demanded that we stop talking about the things I want to talk about. It’s never the bullies that one cares about when one laments that certain contrafactual narratives gain a foothold. It’s the fact that good people, who are right about a lot of things, and who otherwise agree with a lot of what I say, fall for these narratives and repeat them credulously.

That’s what hurts. Not the bullies, but the people who believe them.

Of course, I’m certain that by my saying so, the bullies will take heart in the fact that they can win these wars of attrition — that all they have to do is keep piling on the slurs and the insults and the lies and eventually that camel’s back will break and that equation will flip.

And they’ll pop their champagne corks, even if none of them get to claim the killing blow. They’ll have achieved their goals even without being the last person to place that one last straw. They’ll have won.

At least, temporarily. At least, until people support the demoralized and mend some of the damage. Challenge the lies and the liars using those lies to bully us.

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About the author

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

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109 thoughts on “Bullying the bullies into stopping bullying”

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@93: Ze’s missing the distinction between “sexualizing” and “sexual”, though since ze’s not particularly careful with language (or very careful and just lying and intentionally misusing terms), that’s not surprising.

Re-visiting here a few days later just to point out one or two things. First up, smhll made this reasonable point:

You can’t fucking use rhetorical excess when crusading for people to tone it down and be more polite. If you want people to be more fair and more accurate and show more intellectual depth, then rein it in yourself. Resist the dark pull of parody and exaggeration and cheap shots.

Notably, I was one of those accused of rhetorical excess (in IACB’s #42 “And here we have a good example of the all too common rhetoric inflation.”) which is deliciously ironic, because he engaged in a particularly gross example of it himself, which I’ll lay out in parts.

I had seen IACB’s writings elsewhere on FTB before entering this thread; these had given me a certain impression, which I fair-mindedly stated I was trying not to hold against him in spite of him trying to defend the side of the bullies, but that it was nontheless a consideration:

Bullshit, Iamcuriousblue, the ERVites are provocateurs and bullies. They’re not interested in an honest debate, and having seen your handiwork elsewhere I am wondering to what degree you fall into that mould yourself…

The phrase “I am wondering” is there precisely to speculate how far IACB would go in defending the indefensible; moreover, it is there to distinguish him from the bullies and point out that I am not considering him as being one with them. Guess what his reply to this was?

ENEMY! ENEMY!

Hilarious. In fact it seems most of the animus seems to be due to his confusion that often I am referring to the ERVites, whereas he thinks I’m addressing him; or that I have explicitly conflated him with the ERVites, when as I have just demonstrated, I did not. I won’t attribute the entire blame for the misunderstanding, since my language is sometimes oblique and I could have made that distinction far clearer. And anyway, it’s all over red rover, and we have a new game of ‘gotcha!’ being played today by the bullies. Groundhog Day number #360+.

Today’s gotcha seems to be the PZ/RW Twitter blocking thing, since Rebecca mis-remembered an anti-feminist douchenozzle saying one insult to her, when he actually used a completely different insult. Rhys Morgan and Hayley Stevens have a couple of good posts over at the heresyclub.